Simple and sensitive method for determination of nicotine in plasma by gas chromatography

Smoking and other forms of nicotine consumption are among the most important risk factors for cardiovascular disease and cancer. Many of the cessation therapies require administration of nicotine. Accordingly, precision analysis for nicotine in plasma has become increasingly important. Several of the recently published methods require elaborate sample handling and/or processing. We report a simple, rapid and reliable gas chromatography method with a high sensitivity for determination of unchanged nicotine in plasma, which can be used in the processing and quantification of large series of nicotine samples, e.g., in clinical trials of nicotine-based smoking or tobacco cessation drug delivery systems.